Pion SCTP with RACK is 70% faster with 30% less latency
Details
- External ID
- 46413053
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Pion SCTP with RACK is 70% faster with 30% less latency
- Website domain
- pion.ly
- Launched
- Dec. 28, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 62
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8435114503816794
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
SCTP is a low level protocol focused on reliable packet transmission. Unlike hopelessly flinging packets from one device to another, it makes sure that the packets are correct using CRC, removes duplicate packets, and allows for packets to be sent in any order.Going into an established library, I thought that everything was already implemented and that there wasn't anything to do until I went through the existing issues and organized all the tasks and decided on an order. Sean DuBois (https://github.com/Sean-Der), one of the co-creators and current maintainers of Pion, an open-source pure Go implementation of WebRTC (which uses SCTP), introduced me to a dissertation that was written about improving SCTP from 2021 (https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/d...). To my surprise, the features in it weren't actually implemented yet, and generally went unused even though it depicted pretty big improvements. This came as a bit of a shock to me considering the countless companies and services that actively use Pion with millions of users on a daily basis.This led to two things: 1) implement the feature (done by me) and 2) measure the performance (done by Jo Turk https://github.com/joturk). If you're interested in reading more, please check out the blog post where we go over what SCTP is used for, how I improved it, and the effort that went into making such a large improvement possible.This also marks a huge milestone for other companies and services that use SCTP as they can refer to the implementation in Pion for their own SCTP libraries including any real-time streaming platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Discord screen share, Twitch guest star, and many more!For my personal background, please take a look at a comment below about what it was like for me to get started with open-source and my career related journeys. Thanks for reading!
Enrichment
- Theme
- file transfer and sharing tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- faster sctp protocol implementation
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Implementing low-level networking protocols like SCTP with RACK loss detection requires deep systems engineering, network RFC compliance, and packet-level concurrency management.
What it would actually take: A real version requires deep systems programming in Go or Rust implementing RFC 4960 (SCTP) and RFC 8985 (RACK-TLP). It demands fine-grained network timing, packet parsing, state machine handling, congestion control, and rigorous interoperability and loss-simulation testing that vibe coding cannot accurately formulate.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Windows networking compatibility issues compared to Linux, RACK algorithm receives little attention despite significant impact, Older codebase parts can be daunting for newcomers, Difficulty keeping project roadmap updated efficiently, Lack of public tracker for video streaming tools/technologies
Feature requests: Better way to track and maintain project roadmap/timeline, Mark which issues/features are blocked by others, Improved bandwidth estimation algorithms, Public tracker for video streaming tools and technologies
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 62 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 63 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 54 days after the earliest competitor.
- I made StarDesk, P2P low latency remote desktop built for game and work · hn · 2026-01-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Ustps (UDP Speedy Transmission Protocol Secure) and USSH · hn · 2026-06-08 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- snake · github · 2026-09-11 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Syq · hn · 2026-09-10 · 41 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Flux, a tiny protocol that rethinks email from the ground up · hn · 2026-03-08 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Byteport - Transfer Large Files 2-10x Faster than TCP · yc · 2026-03-02 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- SMTP Tunnel · hn · 2026-01-07 · 140 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Deadwire-HTTPD A triple-threaded x86-64 assembly static server · hn · 2026-07-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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